Friday, September 16, 2016

Below is a great quick recap of a few pieces of huge news on climate this week. It comes from a "Morning Climate" - a news briefing on Monday, Weds, and Fridays from the MacArthur Foundation. Subscribe here.

Climate news would rock the world—if it ever made the front page

NASAreleased data on Monday showing that July tied August for the hottest month in recorded history—the 11th monthly record in a row—giving 2016 better than 99-percent odds of becoming the warmest year on record. On Tuesday, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, released a report advising investors to prepare their portfolios for fallout from global warming. "We see climate-proofing portfolios as a key consideration for all asset owners," the report says. A non-partisan coalition of 43 military and security expertsreleased a briefing book Wednesday for the next U.S. president warning that "climate change presents a strategically significant risk to national and international security, and... more comprehensive action must be taken to ensure the U.S. response is commensurate with the risks." Then on Thursday, a new analysis from Climate Action Tracker said everyone may have to give up their fossil-fuel cars before 2035 to avoid climatic catastrophe. “...[I]t is clear that in order to get to the Paris Agreement’s lower temperature goal of 1.5°C, the world needs to make a paradigm shift to zero-emissions vehicles,” said Markus Hagemann of the NewClimate Institute.

In the aggregate, the week was full of significant climate news, nearly all of it underplayed—when it was picked up at all.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Former US Treasury Secretaries, Hank Paulson (R), Robert Rubin (D), and George Schultz (R) issued a letter to the SEC urging it to require companies to disclose how they are accounting for and preparing for risks posed by climate change -- calling it "the biggest economic risk the world faces today."

The Secretaries praised the SEC's 2010 guidance on the materiality of climate risks, but said it did not go far enough, and most companies have not been disclosing their exposure to these risks well, using boilerplate language that was not helpful. The called for "mandatory and meaningful disclosures of the material effects of climate change on issuers."
It's hard to imagine a more credible group calling for such action -- and another strong signal that companies and investors need to be doing more to understand and mitigate climate risks.

Friday, May 13, 2016

This info-graphic (via Climate Central) has been making the rounds lately -- it does a great job showing the warming trend over time, and just how close we're getting to the dangerous 1.5 degree threshold:

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Ten years after his first TED talk (the first one I ever watched back in 2006!) Al Gore is back on the main stage at TED, reinforcing the urgency of the science of climate change, and also doing a great job of explaining how we're crossing positive tipping points in terms of lower costs for renewable energy and broader support for the kind of climate action we need: